The Abolitionists eBook

In the circles in which these things were going on,
it was the fashion to denounce the Abolitionists.
Women were the most bitter. The slightest suspicion
of sympathy with the “fanatics” was fatal
to social ambition. Mrs. Henry Chapman, the wife
of a wealthy Boston shipping merchant who gave orders
that no slaves should be carried on his vessels, was
a brilliant woman and a leader in the highest sense
in that city. But when she consented to preside
over a small conference of Anti-Slavery women, society
cut her dead, her former associates refusing to recognize
her on the street. The families of Arthur and
Lewis Tappan, the distinguished merchants of New York,
were noted for their intelligence and culture, but
when the heads of the families came to be classified
as Abolitionists the doors of all fashionable mansions
were at once shut against them. They in other
ways suffered for their opinions. The home of
Lewis Tappan was invaded by a mob, and furniture,
books, and bric-a-brac were carried to the
street and there burned to ashes.

The masses of the Northern people were, however, led
to favor slavery by other arguments. One of them
was that the slaves, if manumitted, would at once
rush to the North and overrun the free States.
I have heard that proposition warmly supported by
fairly intelligent persons.

Another argument that weighed with a surprisingly
large number of people, was that civil equality would
be followed by social equality. As soon as they
were free, negro men, it was said, would marry white
wives. “Do you want your son or your daughter
to marry a nigger?” was regarded as a knockout
anti-Abolitionist argument. The idea, of course,
was absurd. “Is it to be inferred that because
I don’t want a negro woman for a slave, I do
want her for a wife?” was one of the quaint
and pithy observations attributed to Mr. Lincoln.
I heard Prof. Hudson, of Oberlin College, express
the same idea in about the same words many years before.

And yet there were plenty of Northern people to whom
“Amalgamation”—­the word used
to describe the apprehended union of the races—­was
a veritable scarecrow. A young gentleman in a
neighborhood near where I lived when a boy was in
all respects eligible for matrimony. He became
devoted to the daughter of an old farmer who had been
a Kentuckian, and asked him for her hand. “But
I am told,” said the old gentleman, “that
you are an Abolitionist.” The young man
admitted the justice of the charge. “Then,
sir,” fairly roared the old man, “you
can’t have my daughter; go and marry a nigger.”

But what probably gave slavery its strongest hold
upon the favor of Northern people was the animosity
toward the negro that prevailed among them. Nowhere
was he treated by them like a human being. The
“black laws,” as those statutes in a number
of free States that regulated the treatment of the
blacks were appropriately called, were inhuman in
the extreme. Ohio was in the main a liberal State.